In IT (information technology) environments, backup administrators are often placed, in charge of performing data backups. Backup administrators often perform multiple roles, such as being a backup operator as well as a backup administrator for carrying out daily tasks. Some example backup tasks may include: ensuring that backup policies and/or jobs are created successfully, ensuring that scheduled backups are completed, ensuring that tapes are managed, and so forth.
Backup administrators often rely on users of a system or application to understand the complexity and business criticality for backup job prioritization. However, there is sometimes a disconnect between IT administrators and the business management. For example, some business managers may feel that a particular set of data is very important and request high prioritization, when in reality there may exist other backup jobs of higher importance. With the disconnect, backup job prioritizations may go unchallenged. This can lead to improper prioritization of backup jobs, which in turn can cause important backup jobs to be relegated to a lesser priority and later backup time in a backup administrator's task list.
In IT departments and datacenters, backup reporting tools can report on the successes and failures of backup jobs. There lies a challenge to perform root-cause analysis and improve the perceived reliability of backup jobs while also attempting to create and edit backup jobs on a regular basis, including the prioritization and prioritization of backup jobs on an administrator's task list. Some methods of prioritizing backup jobs, which often range into hundreds of jobs, can be very inefficient, inaccurate, time consuming, and mundane. Without an adequate backup plan, a business may be at risk. Because companies rely on data and mission-critical applications, the cost of missing a backup window for important backup jobs and losing data is high. Costs for missed backups can exceed many thousands of dollars in loss of data, loss of productivity, and loss of customers.